HBO has apologized for the use of a prosthetic George W. Bush head as a prop in beheading scenes in Game of Thrones.

The severed Bush head, which can be seen with a long ratty wig impaled on a spike in an episode from the show's first season, was used without any intentional commentary on the former president, said the show's creators. "The last head on the left is George Bush," David Benioff and D.B. Weiss noted in a commentary track on the recently released DVD of the show's first season. "George Bush’s head appears in a couple of beheading scenes. It's not a choice, it’s not a political statement. We just had to use whatever heads we had lying around."

In a joint statement released last night, Benioff and Weiss admitted that publicizing this fact was a bad idea. "We use a lot of prosthetic body parts on the show: heads, arms, et cetera," they wrote. "We can’t afford to have these all made from scratch, especially in scenes where we need a lot of them, so we rent them in bulk. After the scene was already shot, someone pointed out that one of the heads looked like George W. Bush. In the DVD commentary, we mentioned this, though we should not have. We meant no disrespect to the former President and apologize if anything we said or did suggested otherwise."

In another statement HBO said, "We were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste. We made this clear to the executive producers of the series who apologized immediately for this inadvertent careless mistake. We are sorry this happened and will have it removed from any future DVD production."